Ways in which classroom learning environments contribute to the failure of modern school systems to serve ethnic and minority groups in large urban centers are analyzed in this ethnographic study. The study, which took place in the elementary schools of the Berkeley Unified School District, consisted of collecting ethnographic information on the…

Some aspects of foreign language classroom discourse are examined from a social theoretical perspective, and an attempt to raise the learners' awareness of the social reality created in interaction with other learners in the foreign language being taught is described. Through peer observation and the retrospective evaluation by the participants of…

A study investigated whether exposure to contrastive rhetoric would deepen international students' awareness of first- and second-language conventions characterizing their own and other students' writing. Participants included 46 University of Arizona students who represented a variety of language backgrounds and were enrolled in four sections of…

Combining linguistics and composition studies in a two-part article (in which part 1 presented the principal concepts of cohesion and information management used in spoken and written discourse) this paper, part 2, describes a model that applies some of these concepts in analyses of the content of samples of published writing in three disciplines…

This study describes the interactive styles of two university professors and their students in traditional and reflective seminar contexts. As both professors taught the same group of undergraduates in an inquiry oriented experimental teacher education program and also taught groups of graduate students in traditional seminars, it was possible to…

To shed light on why President Ronald Reagan chose radio as his favorite medium, a study examined President Reagan's radio addresses in the first year of his second term, 1985, and compared them with his first term speeches of August 1982 to August 1983. The study also compared President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats with Reagan's radio…

A study of discourse synthesis (readers/writers composing new texts by selecting, organizing, and connecting content from source texts) examined the performance of accomplished and less accomplished readers in the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades on a report-writing task. Over a 3-day period 60 English/language arts students wrote informational reports…

Based on the notion that a dialectical perspective better represents the processes and tensions involved in family communication than do traditional models, an exploratory study examined the communication practices of two television families: the Huxtables of "The Cosby Show," and the Keatons of "Family Ties." The series were…

A study examined the linearity of discourse in letters to the editor written in English by native Japanese speakers and native English speakers. The objective was to examine the linear and non-linear patterns of Japanese and English speakers' letters, respectively. It is concluded that cultures are not limited to one rhetorical pattern, and linear…

Using Toulmin's model of argument as its methodology, this paper analyzes the arguments employed by Lee Iacocca, chief executive officer of Chrysler Corporation, to persuade the United States Congress to provide backing for loans necessary for the corporation's financial survival in 1979-1980. After delineating the three main claims made by…

Three experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that a paragraph composed of sentences with identical or closely related topics would be easier to read than one whose sentence topics were only remotely related. The first experiment involved subjective judgments by 131 high school students on the readability of two paragraphs identical in…

A study of cross examination speeches of males and females was conducted to determine gender differences in intercollegiate debate. The theory base for gender differences in speech is closely tied to the analysis of dyadic conversation. It is based on the belief that women are less forceful and dominant in cross examination, and will exhibit…

A study was undertaken to investigate the variation in the speech of child second language learners as a function of the different discourse constraints imposed by three participant structures: narrator-audience, child-adult conversation, and child-child conversation. The subjects were 18 children aged 7 to 12, temporary residents in the United…

In this study, institution-wide strategic plans that were available online were examined in detail to determine how educational technology was referred to in these documents. Based on this data and the literature, a schedule of principles for supporting the implementation of educational technology in post-secondary teaching was developed.…

Our linguistic environment is so polluted at every level that meaningless, uncritical pseudocommunication is becoming the preferred norm even among the highly educated. (JH)